


Beneath shallow breaths

by wawalux



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Awesome Karen Page, Claire Temple Deserves Better, Cold, Confessions, Drunken Confessions, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, Hurt Matt Murdock, Hurt/Comfort, Karen Page Knows Matt is Daredevil, Karen Page's Backstory, Love Confessions, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Minor Matt Murdock/Elektra Nachios, One Shot, POV Matt Murdock, Post-Season/Series 03, Romantic Angst, Romantic Fluff, Sick Character, Sickfic, Slow Burn, Sweet, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:35:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26912245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wawalux/pseuds/wawalux
Summary: “I’b fine,” Matt repeats for the umpteenth time, each word scratching at the embers in his throat until they burn like sparks and fire, “Id’s just a cold.”“It was just a cold until you decided to parkour across rooftops in nothing but a Halloween costume in the middle of winter and turned it into the plague.”[Matt gets the flu/cold/pneumonia - Karen jumps to the rescue. One-shot]
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Karen Page, Matt Murdock/Karen Page
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Beneath shallow breaths

**Author's Note:**

> This initially came from a dream in which I was Foggy (considering the crazy dreams I have, this doesn't even reach the top ten), and Matt was super drunk in a cab with me, saying everything that popped into his mind. Somehow, when I sat down to write it, it came out as this...

“I’b fine,” Matt repeats for the umpteenth time, each word scratching at the embers in his throat until they burn like sparks and fire, “Id’s just a cold.”

“It was just a cold until you decided to parkour across rooftops in nothing but a Halloween costume in the middle of winter and turned it into the plague.”

Foggy is a soothing mix of jovial, exasperated and mother hen. His worry flits through Matt’s aching ribs and tries to curl like a cat in his chest. Matt chases it away, fights the urge to lean into the comfort, to let the lead weight of his eyelids slam shut and his friends fuss over him.

He is _fine_.

“I dob’t deed babysitting,” he throws in the direction of the door where Karen is standing in a vortex of sound that he hopes is the rustling of paper bags and not his brain turning fizzy.

“Yeh, you would think that, being a grown-ass lawyer slash secret hero, but guess what,” Foggy words travel to Matt’s ears in slow motion, like they are stuck in a traffic jam.

“I’b not a–“

“A lawyer? Sure you are Matty. Arguably you are not as awesome as yours truly, but you are still good for the little things. You know, amicable divorces, wills and such.”

A half-grin snaps the chapped skin of his lips and Karen giggles somewhere. The sound rings like bells and reaches his ears garbled in the white noise of his breaths sloshing the goo in his lungs. It’s like she disappears completely from the room the second she goes quiet, her presence a trail of curly white smoke leftover from a dying flame.

“Right Kare, he’s all yours. Remember, no tv after ten, no junk food, and absolutely no daredevilling. I mean it, if you see him so much as twitch towards that horny outfit, you-“

“Yes, Foggy, I’ll sit on him. Don’t worry, Murdock is not going anywhere tonight.”

Karen’s threat wraps itself around Matt’s insides like a blanket. Part of Matt knows it should argue against being treated like a misbehaving toddler but that part is lost within the swirling fog that currently holds most of his mind hostage.

“Ok then, numbers are on the fridge in case you need them. You kids have fun,” Foggy swats in the semblance of a pat at Matt’s tousled hair, taking him by surprise at his proximity, “Not too much fun, mind. Karen, you don’t want to catch whatever her has.”

The impression of a scramble ending in a muted slap, the echoes of Foggy’s laughter and the click of his lock are like the vibrations from the bottom of the deep end of a pool. Matt fights against the dizziness and the heaviness that makes his head tilt back from its sheer weight, resolves to rest it against the wall while he waits for the darkness to shape itself into something resembling a flicker so that he can pin-point Karen’s location.

“I brought soup,” Karen announces softly and her voice seems to liquefy all that is solid within him. His bones start to give under his weight and he places a steadying hand against the wall. The cold trickles up his palms, helps him find one thing that is real in a world that is bouncing mixed signals against the insides of his skull.

His grunt of thanks ends up lost in a coughing fit when Matt forgets the shallowness of his infected lungs. He wheezes through thin breaths as the muscles above his bruised ribs try to unpeel themselves from the bones. Mucus sloshes noisily in his chest, melting any semblance of direction in a thousand shades of black.

“Ok Daredevil, let’s get you to bed,” Karen’s hands pierce through the darkness and place themselves tentatively on the bare skin of his bicep. Her touch feels cold on his fevered skin and Matt marvels at how it burns like fire at the same time. His senses zone into the softness of her pulse, lose track of everything else. Matt doesn’t realize he is swaying on the spot until Karen steadies him with a light pressure on his chest.

“I’b fine,” Matt mumbles, trying to tell Karen or himself or the Stick that is calling him a pussy in his head.

“And I’m Karen,” she moves his free hand away from his broken ribs (huh, when did that get there) and places it securely on her elbow so that he can trail his free hand against the wall to guide himself, “come on.”

Matt follows the rhythm that is bumping lightly against the pads of his fingers along the corridor and into the terrifying blankness that is his living room. He holds on tighter then, tries to predict the placements of his furniture, hoping to rely on muscle memory but finding nothing but mush.

“Think you can manage some food before you pass out? Don’t want you to take the meds on an empty stomach.”

“Do beds,” even Matt startles at his incomprehensible argument. Karen giggles despite herself, chimes that color the room gold and pewter and melt like ink in water.

“Do beds,” Matt tries again, but the consonants end up swallowed in his wretched sinuses that are pulsing with a beat all of their own.

“Alright, alright, no beds,” Matt can hear the gentle curve of her smile distort her words, pinches the crook of her elbow in retaliation.

“Ok, ok,” she squirms out of his grasp and Matt is momentarily lost, unsure whether he can trust the hardness of the floor under the soles of his feet as an indication of where the ground is. Karen finds him a moment later, guides his reaching hands to the back of the couch. He clings on, lost in his own storm, follows its edges until the comforting give of leather brushes against his knees. He then sags, boneless and spent, neck arched back to press the coolness against the base of his skull, trying to quench the fire in his brain. Karen’s hands flutter on his clammy forehead, push his hair back and Matt becomes a symphony of heartbeats before she disappears again.

“Shit, Matt, you are really warm,” Karen’s worry is hard to follow when there’s so much screaming going on inside his body, “I’ve got all sorts of meds, you can pick and choose, they even have names in braille so you are guaranteed that I can’t slip you a mickey.”

“Do, please Karen, they bake be all fuzzy, I can’t…” He wants to tell her can’t _see_ through the chemical haze, finds he can’t see anyways, not when his sinuses are swollen shut and all sense of smell and taste is a white page refusing to be filled. Even his ears seem to be coated with a thin layer of silence, noises muffled and distorted, half-hearted. Tonight, the city talks in whispers and mumbles and Matt can’t seem to focus enough to listen.

“Ok, fine, but if your fever doesn’t break you’ll stop having the option. Now, you are going to eat some soup and then I want to see some solid sleeping Matt, I mean it.”

Goosebumps rustle like branches in the wind as her voice sweeps over his skin. Matt starts to shiver, finds a blanked draped over his lap and forgets how it got there.

Matt flits in and out of consciousness while Karen warms the soup. Noises from the kitchen startle him out of his daze and each time Matt is surprised to find the moments he lost in time. His eyelids are growing heavier every second, Matt worries he’ll need a jack to pry them open and can’t muster more than a feeble crack by the time a bowl of soup is placed carefully on his lap. The spoon is like ice in his palms, and heavy, so heavy Matt contemplates leaving it right there, perched on the crook of his hand for the rest of the night.

“Come on, just a few bites,” Karen jostles him back to reality, her voice filling the empty weight that is sinking the cushion to his right. He tries harder, flexes his arms so that the spoon travels to the bowl and then up towards his lips. One spoonful, then another, and a third. He can’t taste more than texture and heat but the warmth coats the back of his throat, seals the spaces between the scratchiness, smooths his swallows so that air slides in and out of his throat uninterrupted.

He knows that he hasn’t even made a dent in his bowl when the soothing touch of oxygen finally licking back into his useless lungs lulls him softer than a lullaby and the weight of the spoon becomes that of a building. He lets his hand drop and the spoon with it, only realizing too late that it never finished landing, that the bowl had been removed from his lap. The feel of gentle fingers coasting through his hair is the last thing he remembers before he falls asleep.

.

He wakes to a scream stabbing his eardrums, to the electric feel of adrenaline contracting his muscles. He is up before he can understand where up really is, before he can remember why his head has become twice its size and who the sleep-shocked: “What! What’s happening!” belongs to. His shins slam into the coffee table when his calves turn into marshmallows but even that pain is muted compared to the rest of the wrath his body is unleashing on him. He’s almost on all fours before Karen can guide him back to the couch. He wants to fight but he doesn’t know where to start, too many enemies inside and out. His head rolls forward while his stomach frowns and contemplates spilling inside out. His lungs rattle with air that is too liquid. Matt only hears Karen’s voice through the pressure of her hands against his neck, against his chest. Words are garbled vibrations that aren’t enough to steady his heartbeat. The scream gets lost in a world of ice as his body burns with the fire his blindness left behind.

Karen fades, is swallowed up into the endless black that squeezes solidly from all sides. She resurfaces in the form of a jabbing of cold metal under his tongue, forced in through his slack jaw as he tries and fails to turn air from liquid back to gas. The thermometer makes his exhales whistle as they bend around it and the beeping of the temperature read is a single screech of agony that tears his skull in two. Matt groans a rasp that turns the next inhale into sandpaper. It turns into a bout of cough before its completely out, lungs racking uselessly, fighting to become one with his throat. Matt almost keels forward again.

“Matt? Matt?”

An urgency is calling his name. Matt looks for his dad but the voice doesn’t fit.

“Shit Matt, your fever is really high, we need to get you to the hospital.”

Somewhere in the tornado of his mind the word ‘hospital’ registers, triggers alarm bells that clank too loudly against the inside of his eardrums. Matt uses the new pain to find a way back into his body.

“Do, do, do, do hospitals,” he can’t even say it, he can’t say ‘no’ and the effort is causing the precious trickles of air to leak out of his lungs. Matt worries he doesn’t have the strength to suck them back in, uses everything he has to shake his head, side to side, making the mucus slosh around his skull.

Karen is gone again. Matt needs to find her, to stop her before she calls an ambulance, but his legs have floated out of his perception. He’s become an extension of the couch, a churning mess of broken circuits and blank senses.

He’s had worse, shit, he’s had worse. Stick has taught him to survive worse. This is just a cold, it’s just a cold.

Matt stills, freezes every available limb and takes calming meditative breaths through his parched mouth. He remains immobile except for the shallow push and pull of his lungs, careful not to unsettle the dust in his lungs or the bile in his throat or even the liquid in his ear. He stretches his hearing outside of his own body, ignores the creaking of his ribs, the splattering in his chest, his fevered heartbeat. He sorts through the muted onslaught of half-noises, all bunched up and too loud and too low and too much like when Matt went partially deaf.

Karen’s on the phone, the pacing of her bare feet a gentle patter that reaches Matt in 2D. He zones in, tries to hear the voice coming out of the receiver but his senses are too thin, and he struggles to catch Karen’s end of the conversation. He waits for the one-sided discussion to start making sense while all syllables mush themselves together on their way to his ears. He wants to clear the haze from his mind but moving is not an option. He’s going to be sick. Shit. He’s going to be sick so badly that he wants to clamp his lips shut and give up on breathing altogether. Yet he needs to move, he needs to stop her before the faded sound of ambulance syrens screech to a halt in front of his block.

Karen’s phone lands next to his face, smooth and cold despite the warmth of Karen’s face.

“Matt?”

Antiseptic and winter spice, the snap of latex gloves. The dark shapes itself into something that feels like hope, like safety, like the feel of his father’s face under the pads of his fingers. Just one word and Claire is right there, right in front of him. His mind sings in relief, an ode to joy.

Claire’s here, it’s going to be ok.

“Claire?”

“Jeez you sound bad. Nothing new there, I guess. Been a while, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, too long.”

“What’s going on Matt? And don’t give me any of your Saint Matthew ‘I’m fine’ martyr bullshit.”

Her tone whips a smile out of Matt’s face.

“Id’s just a bad cold, Claire.”

“Sure it is, Matt. Your friend told me your temperature is high enough to boil an egg. Let me guess. A few bruised ribs? Some broken even? I guess that would sound more like falling timber than an old ship…”

“Hah,” laughing hurts, breathing hurts, everything hurts, “maybe,” he concedes.

“Any coughing?”

“A little…”

“Which means yes and it’s bad in Matt’s world. How’s the coughing? Wet or dry?”

“It’s fine, Claire”

“So…wet. Look Matt, busted ribs make it hard to take deep breaths and they are effectively an open house for pneumonia. It sounds like you are well on your way there. You are going to have to listen to me very carefully and do exactly as Karen say if you don’t want to spend the rest of the month in hospital. You hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah I hear you.”

“Ok. Now I’ve given Karen a list of medications and things she can do so you don’t give up the ghost in your living room tonight. I wrote a prescription for antibiotics and your friends can run to fill it in the morning. You take them with food, you stay put until your lungs clear, you got that?”

It’s silly, but the sentence ‘your friends’ feels like Christmas morning, a realization that Matt can’t bring himself to accept and yearns for in the deepest parts of his soul. But that wasn’t the question. Matt mumbles in assent.

“Damn it Matt, don’t make me come all the way there and kick your stubborn ass. You know I will.”

Matt laughs and finds himself a little intimidated by the threat. He may be a ninja or whatever they want to call him but he is not stupid enough to land himself in a fight against Claire.

“I’ll be good, Claire. I promise.”

“Ha! Heard that one before!”

“Ah…I will. I…uh…Thank you, Claire.”

There’s a pause on the other line. Matt thinks Claire takes a deep breath, sighs a little, but he can’t be sure with the residual static between the two lines scratching at his eardrums.

“And hey Matt, next time, let’s not meet like this.”

The line goes dead with the shadow of Claire’s smile. There’s a familiarity in it that will always feel like home. Matt finds he is still smiling.

Karen doesn’t waste time, removes her phone from Matt’s grasp and replaces it with a glass of tepid water.

“Down that,” she orders him. Matt does, feeling each sip rise back up with his Adam’s apple. He swallows each back down, stubborn, the agonising scrape in his throat worth it if it means he is not going to be sick all over Karen.

Karen is back with an assortment of pills that she places directly into Matt’s mouth along with a fresh glass of water, effectively stopping Matt from asking what they might be or even arguing against them unless he is willing to spit them out into his lap. He fights anyways, tries to growl but whimpers and coughs through his nose to spare his clamped lips.

“Nope, sorry Matt, time for negotiations is over. Claire’s orders. Now, swallow.” Matt does.

Last but not least is a syrupy goo that Matt is glad he can’t taste. It drips down his throat slow as honey, coats his insides in subtle grit. He knows he’ll be able to taste it in days to come.

“Come on, up you get.” Karen tugs at both arms with surprising force considering her small frame. Matt finds himself needing too much of it to stand on his own legs. He sways and tries to jimmy his knees straight so they won’t buckle underneath him. Karen drapes one of his arms around her slender shoulders and half guides, half drags his sorry ass to the bathroom. She drops him off on the closed toilet lid and Matt’s head falls into his hands.

The knobs of his tap screech when Karen turns them, vibrate jarringly all the way to the insides of Matt’s molars. The spray of his shower seals the room in white noise, trapped into the four walls and the door that Karen is tugging shut. It’s not long before the contours are outlined by the steam, every particle of air glazed in silky wetness.

“Shirt off, Murdock.”

It’s like her voice is travelling as lazily as the steam. Matt’s sure he must’ve misunderstood.

“Whuh?”

“You heard me,” her fingers travel to the edges of his t-shirt, yank confidently upwards until Matt’s shirt is stuck under his armpits along with his next inhale.

“Time for negotiation is over. Shirt off or we are heading to the hospital.”

Matt lifts his arms, feels the fabric slide over his skin. A shiver runs through the length of his spine, one that is mostly related to the fake chill of his fever, but also to the brush of Karen’s fingers on his skin. He thinks he feels a slight tremor in Karen’s hold but the details are slippery and step away from his perception before he can grasp them.

Karen uncorks something, a jar maybe? The lid pops loudly and clanks like plastic when she sets it down by the sink. Her fingers spoon what feels like lotion, her movements narrated by an unidentifiable slurping sound that makes Matt want to step out of reach.

There’s a beat of silence as she hesitates inches away from his bare chest, perched on the floor in front of him, her heart doing a fuzzy dance that Matt can’t interpret. Her breaths change pace, throw wafts of steam in his direction. The taste of them is lost to Matt tonight, yet he can’t help the way the tip of his tongue bends in anticipation.

The lotion (God Matt hopes this goop is lotion) reaches Matt before her fingers do and he jumps at the unexpected sting of cold.

“Sorry,” Karen breathes, jerking her fingers back and then resuming her touch, replacing the coldness of the balm with the warmth of her palms rubbing gentle circles on his chest. The vapors burn his nostrils even when they are not accompanied by an identifiable smell. Matt wonders if his skin has caught fire and he is inhaling the fumes.

“What is it?” he asks, hating the way the ointment is forming a thin layer of impenetrable oil on his skin, adding another loss to his wrecked senses, “I don’t want-”

“Suck it up counsellor, I’m not asking,” Karen interrupts him.

He hates being treated like a child, he hates the pity associated with his helplessness. He hates it and he wants to tell Karen he can do this himself, that he doesn’t need the fussing, that he is _fine_. He opens his mouth to do just that, even as he leans into her touch, hoping she’ll never stop.

“My uh…my mum used to rub this on my chest when I was sick,” Karen says before he can align his vocal cords to speak, “I’m not sure if it actually did anything, but it always used to make me feel better, you know?”

Matt knows, remembers his father’s panicked attempts to restore his health when he was small. How he’d feed him a steady diet of orange juice and absolutely terrible chicken soup that Matt would spend hours picking the bits of carrots out of. But it was his ear infections that he remembers the most. How his father would place his giant calloused palms gently on either side of his head and tell Matt he was punching the pain away. He’d stay that way until Matt told him it was better. Matt would fall asleep with the heat from his father’s hands still radiating from his skin.

“It’s funny the things that stick with you, right? How you probably can only remember a handful of full days from your childhood, I mean morning to evening. And Jesus, I don’t think I could recall all the features in my mother’s face if I tried…But I can still smell the butter off her hands from when she used to make pie on Sundays, and hear her sing at the top of her lungs when she showered!” Karen laughs softly, “she was a _really_ bad singer, I think your bat-ears would’ve bled…”

Matt laughs. His chest rumbles like thunder, makes it sound like he is almost growling.

“I can still remember how soft her hands were on my chest,” she trails her hand from his collarbone to the bottom of his ribs. Matt feels it too, the softness, like he’s right there, with her.

“I wish I could’ve met her…” He tells her before he realizes he is talking. He can feel it, the woman in an apron, the homey smell of freshly baked pies. Karen, younger, softer, before her loneliness shaped her courage, when a mother’s love was still enough to keep her whole.

Karen’s heart stutters, and so do her fingers. They leave his chest and travel up but disappear before they can find his face. Matt’s hands reach out, suddenly fearful of the endless emptiness stretching around him. Karen traps his fingers in her hand, places them on the fringe of her neck so that she can resume rubbing.

“I’ve got you,” she croons and the three little words echo in each of the pulses inside Matt’s body (in his sinuses, in his ears, in his throat, in his chest, in his chest, in his chest). Matt liquifies, turns into a puddle that Karen could just mop up and wring out into the sink. He rubs his eyes before they can spill treacherous tears down his unkept stubble.

It’s just the fumes. Just the fumes.

“You’re allowed not to be fine, Matt,” she whispers kindly, “we all are.”

Matt gapes like a fish, his arguments melting under the stroke of her fingers.

“It doesn’t make you any less of a person to accept help once in a while.”

Matt wants to turn away, to tell her she is wrong. But her voice is soft soft soft, like a mother’s touch. It runs down Matt’s back like a waterfall, reminds him of a type of warmth he lost, again and again and again, until he learned to live with the cold.

Karen is working the rub into his back when the meds start to take effect. The heaviness in his temples is replaced by a lightness that lifts him higher and higher and higher until his head is floating a little above where his skull is. The combination of whatever is being rubbed into his chest and the steam that is soaking into each one of his pores is gently prying his sinuses open, allowing in streams of the tasteless wet oxygen. When he dislodges what has the texture of a piece of his lungs in a coughing bout and Karen orders him to spit it into the tub, he finds his mortification is buried somewhere deep where it doesn’t sting so bad. Each of her strokes ripples like a stone landing in water, waves of pleasure that spread from the epicenter and light up his nerves like a Christmas tree. Matt finds himself beaming up at her.

“Haha, someone’s feeling better,” Karen laughs. Matt purrs the length of her next rub. She places her free hand against the edge of his hairline, measures his temperature with the back of her hand. Matt drops his head to force her closer. She shifts to cup him under his chin.

“Someone is a lightweight when it comes to drugs,” Matt lifts his hand to her face to feel her smile, pats the shape of it clumsily. The tips of his fingers end up in her mouth when she speaks again, “I bet I could ask you anything right now and you would tell me.”

Matt forgets what she says in her next stroke down his back. He’s changed his mind, he doesn’t mind the balm. He likes the balm.

Karen laughs again. Shit, was he talking out loud?

“Yes, you are, but please go ahead, I don’t mind,” she purrs seductively. Matt’s breathing grinds to a stop, “now,” she continues, “what can I ask you.”

“I’m Daredevil,” Matt admits helpfully.

Karen giggles again, a sound so pure and beautiful it makes his toes curl. He thinks he doesn’t tell her, but then Karen snorts, so maybe he did.

“Who knew this whole secret life was just one bad cold away. Our lives could’ve been so different,” there’s a note of melancholy in her last sentence, it tastes bitter even when Matt can’t taste. The silence shifts, thickens like custard. Matt knows Karen is about to ask him something that has been weighting on her shoulders but finds himself unable to brace himself against the blow.

“That girl in your bed…” she breathes.

Matt doesn’t need to ask who, her memory rumbles like a crumpling building. Something inside him tears anew, a cut so deep it can never heal. Blood floods his chest while his fingers twitch at the feel of the taught skin of her muscles turning to softness when pressed against his lips. She calls him the way only she did, _Matthew_ , the way only she could, an echo in his ears. A name that was only hers to say, like he was, in his world of “Matts”.

That man, the ‘Matthew’ died along with her that night, foolish and hopeful to be crushed together in a new beginning.

_This is what living feels like._

Matt clears his throat, surprised not to find dust and soot and blood interrupting the motion.

“Elektra,” he clarifies, feeling a strange need to preserve her memory intact, “her name was Elektra.”

He thinks Karen will hesitate but then he has never learned not to underestimate her strength.

“What was she doing here?”

His bedsheets have been washed a thousand times since. The couch is new, leather this time, so that blood can be wiped off, so that his injuries don’t leave a scar in his home. His apartment has seen so many changes, really. Elektra was here a lifetime ago, in a world where Stick still existed. The Hand…

Some days he can still smell her. Trapped in the fibers of his mattress, or his pillow maybe. He shifts and she’s right there. And then she disappears a thousand times when he begs her to stay.

“Trying to become someone she wasn’t,” he tells Karen.

They both had, for a little while. Tried so hard to make the broken parts of themselves fit together to make a whole. Matt still feels like the different bits of himself don’t quite add-up to one.

“Where you…” Dating? Fucking? Together? In love? Matt will never hear the end of the question she can’t bring herself to finish.

“No, not then. We were just…” What were they? Testing the edges of Matt’s identity? Letting the devil roam free? Freeing that part of him that he had to keep hidden? Fooling themselves into living in the past? “Trying to finish a fight that only ended in Midland Circle.”

Karen is as quiet as her hands, still and sticky in her lap. Matt misses her touch, alone in the dark with the lotion sticking to the steam in the air. He tries to take a deep breath to dislodge the weight that is pressing against his heart, ends up stuck in another bout of coughing that makes his eyes stream. Karen waits until he is done trying to turn his lungs inside out, until after he has shuddered and spit the goop from his mouth.

“I guess I needed to hear that,” she admits quietly.

Matt doesn’t know what to say. He has been trying to believe that each of his regrets will one day form the back of the tapestry of life, like shadows and light. He wants to believe the light will outweigh the darkness one day.

“Now drink this,” Karen hands him another glass of water, brushes something from her face. Hair? Tears? “All of it.”

God, Karen is _so_ bossy. He kinda loves that about her. Who is he kidding. He loves everything about her. He never stopped.

The pulse that has been ticking steady as a grandfather’s clock in his periphery picks up the pace, sprints through its next few beats like it’s running out of time.

Shit, was he talking out loud again?

Matt busies himself with greedy gulps and hands the empty glass back to the hummingbird heart.

“The glass is sweating,” he informs her helpfully, steam forming beads of perspiration that pool against his hand.

“What…what did you just say?”

The hummingbird is starting to worry Matt, beating helplessly against the cage of her chest, trying to set itself free.

“The glass is sweating,” Matt repeats, focusing on the beat, hands out ready to catch it when it pops into his hands. He’s never had pets before but he supposes he wouldn’t mind, a pet heart, if it was this heart. He could keep it close, use it as his personal nightlight to fall asleep.

Karen startles another laugh, and Matt wonders if he should tape his mouth shut. It seems like the filter between thoughts and talking has melted in the haze of the drugs.

“No need to tape your mouth shut,” Karen reassures him. Matt considers blushing, thinks there is not enough heat to spare with the fire raging in his skull. Except he doesn’t mind it so much anymore.

“Alright. How does sleep sound?”

Sleep sounds good, not as good as Karen rubbing more goo onto his chest, but he’ll take what he can get. He tells Karen so, listens to her pulse summersault and almost asks her why.

“Want to brush your teeth first?”

Matt nods, irrationally grateful when she hands him his toothbrush complete with the most perfect dab of toothpaste. He can’t even taste the freshness but the bristles tickle his gums and Matt has to pause to giggle. He laughs harder when Karen asks him why, then scrubs his tongue for good measure, trying to rid himself of the residual lung tissue interspersed in his throat. He spits and rinses, the change in altitude when he leans over the sink enough to make his insides swoop.

Karen is ready to guide him back to the bedroom, walks backwards so that she can hold both his hands, leaves him on the edge of his bed. Matt sits and wants to pull her with him, wants her to be his own personal blanket. He feels giddy with the rush of steam still seeping in and out of his lungs, like little dragon breaths that float higher than his mind. He pouts when she moves away, sits on the bed trying to fit sadness in the space between his smiles.

Her fingers brush his lips out of the blue, chase the corners of his irrational smile, makes it curl tighter. Matt almost pants from the pleasure, but Karen sticks the thermometer back into his mouth before he can think of reacting.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she admonishes.

“I can’t look at you in any way,” he mumbles with the thermometer clacking against his teeth.

Karen moves her hand to cup his face again, strokes the edge of his stubble and it’s not so bad anymore, the metal under his tongue. Matt almost forgets it’s there until it beeps in an effort to tear his eardrums apart.

“Alright, better. Still fever, but you are not about to turn into steam,” Matt grins, almost proud. She pushes him gently on the bed, and he lies, suddenly heavy from head to toe, feeling the weight of each of his cells. Karen has propped a few cushions under his head so that he can breathe through the tiny tunnels that the steam has excavated in his nostrils. She pulls the covers up to his chin, places a soft kiss on his brow.

“Goodnight, Mr Murdock,” she whispers against the humid patch her lips have left behind.

“Goodnight Miss Page,” Matt mutters back, a ghost of a smile flashing against his exhausted lips.

He fades out quickly, seemingly between one thought and the next, so he can’t be sure if he imagined it or not, the brush of heat against his lips, a breath hesitating too close. Fingers tracing the shape of his jaw, a thumb finding the corner of his mouth. Her heart had never been louder.

Matt’s asleep before his hand has finished reaching out for her.

**Author's Note:**

> Mean? Maybe a little. But I think in this case poor Matt is a little too ill to turn this fic into anything more romantic.
> 
> Thoughts are welcome, as always. And either way, thanks for reading <3
> 
> P.S. If you are looking after someone with COVID-19, don't do what Karen just did (did? Didn't do? Who knows!). Wait until they have recovered and have stopped being infectious and then, and ONLY THEN, kiss the shit out of them.


End file.
